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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Dr. King was going to propose a separate state for blacks so they could eventually achieve economic parity that he believed wouldn't happen on its own in America.

I guarantee you that he still would have demanded that whites completely support blacks financially. Note too that King’s supposed “last plan” was identical with the demand of the genocidal Nation of Islam.

What if you believed deeply that you'd had the opportunity to prevent one of the darkest moments in this country's history but failed to grab it?

The Rev. Nathaniel Irvin, the pastor of Old Storm Branch Baptist Church in Bath, said some were reluctant to be tied to Dr. King.

Whether it haunts you wouldn't be in doubt; the question is, how much?

The emotions are still raw for John Watkins 40 years after the death of his civil rights mentor, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. History will always record April 4, 1968, as the day Dr. King was felled by an assassin's bullet in Memphis, Tenn., but what Mr. Watkins believes could have happened 12 days earlier in Augusta brings tears to his eyes even to this day.

"I didn't do what I should have done," the former Augusta attorney and civil rights leader said between sobs while discussing the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's last visit to Augusta on March 23, 1968. "I regret it today."

Mr. Watkins believes he didn't try hard enough to convince Dr. King not to return to Memphis to continue his work with striking black sanitation workers. Because he was the driving force in arranging Dr. King's speech at Beulah Grove Baptist Church, his hindsight about what could have been is stronger than most.

"He had no business going down there to the sanitation workers' strike," Mr. Watkins said, convinced the strike over better pay and job conditions was too much of a local issue for someone of Dr. King's international stature. "He knew that, and I told him that. But I didn't do what frat brothers normally do. I should have grabbed him by the collar and said, 'Look ML, you ain't going back down there.' "

OTHERS WHO WERE at Dr. King's speech in Augusta don't have the same intense feelings as Mr. Watkins, but they are proud to have been there, and, though not knowing at the time, witnessed history.

"I'll never forget the day. It was an emotional experience," said the Rev. Nathaniel Irvin, 79, the pastor of Old Storm Branch Baptist Church in Bath. "When he came into the church, it was like electricity had hit this place. ABC News, NBC News, all these cameras, reporters swarming there. I'd never seen anything like it."

He and others who were there -- attendance estimates range from 500 to several thousand -- almost were denied that opportunity. Though Dr. King had made speeches in Augusta twice -- the first at Tabernacle Baptist Church in 1962 -- this time he was not as welcome by some of Augusta's black elite because of his increasingly controversial views.

A year earlier, in 1967, Dr. King had spoken out against America's role in the Vietnam War at New York's Riverside Church, calling the United States "the world's greatest purveyor of violence." He was also in the midst of drawing attention to the nation's impoverished, promising to put an international spotlight on the issue with his Poor People's Campaign in the summer of 1968.

Some black churches turned Mr. Watkins down when he asked them to play host to Dr. King, and his aggravation about it is not easily hidden.

"They were scared," he said of some black community leaders at the time, whom he believes didn't want to damage the status they had attained with Augusta's white power brokers.

"At that time, you'd be surprised some people in education, some ministers were reluctant to be identified to a degree with this kind of movement that King had run," said the Rev. Irvin, who was then the pastor of Greater Mount Canaan Missionary Baptist Church in Augusta, which wasn't approached because it was too small. "Sometimes people are intimidated."

Beulah Grove's pastor, the Rev. B.I. Vernon, was not. William Howard, a deacon emeritus at the church, recalled the discussion the Rev. Vernon had with church elders about the request.

The meeting didn't last long.

"He needs a place to speak and we are going to open our doors to him," Mr. Howard, 83, recalled what the Rev. Vernon told the deacons.

Their response: "Let him come on in here. Simple." No dissent.

"I think we all were proud of the fact that we could open our doors to him," Mr. Howard said.

THE VISIT was a last-minute affair. An associate of Dr. King called Mr. Watkins at his home the morning of March 20, 1968, and asked him a big favor: Could he arrange for Dr. King to speak in Augusta three days from then to help push his plan for the Poor People's Campaign?

Mr. Watkins agreed out of his affection for Dr. King, whom he had met while at Howard University law school in the 1950s and got to know better during his visits to Augusta. But there were concerns, the main ones being whether he could pull it off in so short a time and, as he puts it, "then not get killed."

"They called my house and told my children and the maid that they were going to kill me if I brought King to Augusta," Mr. Watkins recalled. "They were going to kill both of us."

So worried was he about security that only the airport manager at Bush Field knew when and on which runway Dr. King's private plane was going to land. The plane arrived about three hours later than scheduled. Rumors had it that the plane was late because of bomb threats; Mr. Watkins says Dr. King told him business affairs in Albany, Ga., kept him longer than expected.

On the plane were Dr. King's sons, Dexter and Martin III, and his second-in-command, Ralph Abernathy Jr. Once on the ground, Mr. Watkins took no chances. He put Dr. King and his sons in a car with him and had Dr. Abernathy ride in another. The cars took different routes to the church -- Dr. King's took Tobacco Road and the other went down Georgia Highway 56 (Mike Padgett Highway).

"We didn't tell the police, we didn't tell anybody because we thought they were going to be on it to get us," Mr. Watkins said. "Can't you see the drama in that? Can't even tell the police."

When they arrived at Beulah Grove, they were greeted by an exuberant crowd that overflowed the church.

"All you had to do was say King was coming to Augusta, and black folk were ready to jump into the street just like after a Joe Louis fight," said James Carter III, who was 29 when he heard Dr. King speak and is now a preeminent chronicler of Augusta's black history. "And people were eager to see him. When they came in there, they just wanted to look at him and touch him and they admired him so much."

They didn't get a chance to do much touching because Dr. King didn't linger long in the parking lot. Once out of the car, Mr. Watkins and Dr. King ran inside the church with their bodyguards closely in tow, fearing there might be snipers about.

DR. KING'S SPEECH lasted only about 10 minutes because he was exhausted from the day's activities. In his 2000 book about Dr. King's speech, King's Last Visit to Augusta , Mr. Watkins wrote that Dr. King apologized for being late and asked those there to support his Poor People's march.

"There are those who would like for us to fail in this endeavor," Dr. King said, according to Mr. Watkins' book. "But I will tell you they will not succeed in their efforts, for we are doing God's will."

He wouldn't get a chance to lead the march. The Rev. Abernathy and other civil rights leaders carried through with Dr. King's plans, but his death killed any momentum it had. The Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., lasted 42 days from May 14 to June 24, 1968.

Dr. King's death also stopped him from carrying through on a plan that would have charted a new and highly controversial course for the civil rights movement, according to Mr. Watkins. In his book, he wrote that Dr. King shared his frustrations about the economic inequities blacks faced in America over dinner at a hotel after his speech. He then whispered to Mr. Watkins what he hoped to eventually do, something the former Augustan decided not to put in his book.
But after 40 years of secrecy, and initially saying he would probably take it to his grave, he revealed what it was: Dr. King was going to propose a separate state for blacks so they could eventually achieve economic parity that he believed wouldn't happen on its own in America.

"It nearly scared me to death," Mr. Watkins wrote of the idea.

COMING TO GRIPS with Dr. King's death wasn't easy for Mr. Watkins. For decades, he couldn't bring himself to drive by Beulah Grove. It took him until 2003 before he would revisit the church.

"Man, he was a good guy," Mr. Watkins said.

Mr. Carter said Dr. King's importance to the black community can't be overstated. He has not been replaced, Mr. Carter said, though there have been a number of pretenders to the throne.

"A lot of folks looked for a successor to King, but a successor never emerged," he said. "They thought Joe Lowery was going to do it. Nope. They thought Jesse (Jackson) was going to do it. Nope. And then later on, one of the latter guys was Al Sharpton. You have not had a black leader who could rally all the black folks like King could."

Reach Mike Wynn at (706) 823-3218 or mike.wynn@augustachronicle.com.

WHAT HE TOLD AUGUSTA IN 1968
Excerpts from the Rev. Martin Luther King's last speech in Augusta 40 years ago today (March 23, 1968), as quoted in the book, King's Last Visit to Augusta: He was Persona Non Grata.

- "This country has lost its sense of direction, its sense of purpose and it needs to rearrange its priorities. For we cannot fight an immoral war in Vietnam where many of our young men are dying and at the same time finance the war on poverty to help our people in this country -- white and black people living in what seems like hopeless conditions."

- "Let them think of me as they like. As long as breath is in this body, I am going to do whatever I can to eliminate these conditions so when our boys come home, we can truly help the poor and uneducated."

Murder and almost certainly rape victim, Chandra Levy. (After one year, it was impossible to test her skeletal remains for rape.)

Levy's convicted murderer, Ingmar Guandique

Posted by Nicholas Stix

YouTube - Video produced by Pierre Kattar

Why does the female dunce in the video, “reporter” Sari Horwitz, say “someone” knocked Levy off the trail? We know who knocked her off the trail, and raped and murdered her— Salvadoran illegal alien Ingmar Guandique. A second time, Horwitz also suggests that Guandique was not the killer (“Guandique [putting her hands in the air], or somebody else…”).

Is she insinuating that Guandique was a patsy, and the real killer was, say, a Generic White Devil? After all, if you’re a good racial socialist, and you’re looking to cast reasonable doubt on the illegal alien gangbanger cut-throat rapist-killer who actually committed the crime, and who had a history of laying in wait for white females at the very same spot in the very same park, you’re certainly not going to divert attention onto another member of a protected class, be it an illegal alien rapist-murderer or a black American rapist-murderer. It’s got to be the great white whale.

WASHINGTON — The public will soon learn more about the subject of sealed hearings in the Chandra Levy murder case.

Levy was a Washington intern whose 2001 slaying attracted attention because of her romantic relationship with a California congressman. Ingmar Guandique, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was convicted of her murder in 2010. But a judge has been holding sealed post-conviction hearings in recent weeks that could signal a problem with the prosecution.

After a 2 1/2-hour sealed proceeding on Thursday, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Gerald Fisher said redacted, partial transcripts of hearings in December and January will be made available to the public and the media in about a week. A prosecutor said defense lawyers made assertions in those proceedings that the government does not agree with.

THE devastated family of a nine-year-old boy who hanged himself say he took his life after racist taunts by Asian bullies.

Aaron Dugmore — thought to be one of Britain's youngest suicides after bullying — was found in his bedroom after months of jibes at school, they claim.

His family say that Aaron was threatened with a plastic KNIFE by one Asian pupil — who warned him: "Next time it will be a real one."

Heartbreak ... mum Kelly-Marie Dugmore and stepdad Paul Jones

But despite complaints to the school, where 75 per cent of pupils come from ethnic [N.S.: non-white] backgrounds, they claim nothing was done to stop the bullying.

Heartbroken mum Kelly-Marie Dugmore is convinced the taunts led to her son killing himself two weeks ago. She sobbed: "We are not racist people. Aaron got on with all the children at his last school, and for him to have been bullied because of the colour of his skin makes me feel sick to my stomach."

Aaron joined Erdington Hall primary in Birmingham last September after the family moved nearby. But Kelly-Marie, 30, and stepdad Paul Jones, 43, noticed a change in him from his first day.

Paul said: "He became argumentative with his brothers and sisters, which wasn't like him at all. Eventually he told us that he was being bullied by a group of Asian children at school and had to hide from them in the playground at lunchtime. He said one kid even said to him, 'My dad says all the white people should be dead'."

Kelly-Marie claimed: "He was even threatened with a plastic knife by one boy. When Aaron stuck up for himself he said it'd be a real one next time.

"I went to see head Martin Collin a few times, but he only said, 'You didn't have to come to this school, you chose to come here'."

A spokesman for Erdington Hall, labelled unsatisfactory by Ofsted, said Aaron had "settled in quickly". West Midlands Police are investigating the causes of Aaron's death.

But don’t complain. Don’t say anything about basic underwriting standards or what happened (MMM I) last time they were systematically disregarded. Better to be in a permanent depression economy, than to incur the wrath of pc commissars like Matt Yglesias, for whom facts are racist.

If they have third-world murder rates, it’s because they are third-world cities!

As for New Orleans, I guess Nicole Gelinas was wrong when she said that NOLA knew how to do reconstruction right.

A note to readers, regarding murder rates around the world. Kant maintains, linking to a graphic from Richard Florida, that South Africa has a murder rate of 17 per 100,000. That official number is surely a fraction of South Africa’s real murder rate. Approximately 10 years ago, the country was the world’s murder capital; since then, the authorities have more or less stopped keeping any sort of credible records.

Those pushing President Obama’s gun-control agenda often portray the United States as one of the murder hot spots of the world, but the numbers tell a different story.

Even more revealing, gun murders in the U.S. are concentrated in big cities that typically have the strictest gun-control regulations. And it is those cities’ gun murder rates that are comparable to the rates in some of the deadliest countries in the world.

If it were a country, New Orleans (with a rate 62.1 gun murders per 100,000 people) would rank second in the world.

Detroit’s gun-homicide rate (35.9) is just a bit less than El Salvador (39.9).

Baltimore’s rate (29.7) is not too far off that of Guatemala (34.8).

Gun murder in Newark (25.4) and Miami (23.7) is comparable to Colombia (27.1).

Washington D.C. (19) has a higher rate of gun homicide than Brazil (18.1).

Atlanta’s rate (17.2) is about the same as South Africa (17).

Cleveland (17.4) has a higher rate than the Dominican Republic (16.3).

Gun murder in Buffalo (16.5) is similar to Panama (16.2).

Houston’s rate (12.9) is slightly higher than Ecuador’s (12.7).

Gun homicide in Chicago (11.6) is similar to Guyana (11.5).

Phoenix’s rate (10.6) is slightly higher than Mexico (10).

Los Angeles (9.2) is comparable to the Philippines (8.9).

Boston rate (6.2) is higher than Nicaragua (5.9).

New York, where gun murders have declined to just four per 100,000, is still higher than Argentina (3).

Even the cities with the lowest homicide rates by American standards, like San Jose and Austin, compare to Albania and Cambodia, respectively.

It’s true those comparisons are American cities to nations. But most of the countries listed have relatively small populations, in many cases comparable to large U.S. metros.

Here’s a look at the gun-control laws in the five U.S. cities with the highest gun-murder rates.

In New Orleans, you have to apply to the state police office and take classes with the National Rifle Association, then wait 45-90 days to get a concealed weapons permit.

Detroit comes under tough state laws that require a multistage process to get a gun. First, you must pass the Michigan Basic Pistol Safety questionnaire. Then you have to apply for the Ten Day Handgun Purchase Permit. (If you don’t buy the exact gun you applied for, you have to start the process all over.) After buying the gun, you have to fill out a Michigan Pistol Sales Record form and make sure the pistol has a valid firearm Safety Inspection Certificate. Federal laws also require a background check if you purchase a gun from a licensed dealer with a Federal Firearms License.

Maryland law governs Baltimore gun owners. The state prohibits the sale of handguns and many high-powered weapons without background checks. Magazines that hold more than 20 rounds are illegal.

Newark is in a state that already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, and they may get stricter. The New Jersey state assembly passed a series of measures on February 21. One bill would limit the size of magazines to 10 shells from the current 15. Others would outlaw .50 caliber weapons, create weapon-free school zones, require background checks for private gun sales and require safety training for people seeking firearm purchase permits. The state Senate and Gov. Chris Christie would have to approve the changes.

Florida law requires citizens in Miami wait three days before a handgun purchase.

Firearms-rights supporters point to the high rates of gun murders where tight gun-control laws are in effect. Dave Workman of the Second Amendment Foundation says the belief in the firearms community is those laws mean people simply can’t protect themselves and criminals know it.

He says, “Criminals realize victims are far less likely to fight back. There’s no deterrent factor.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy his “100 percent support” Monday despite complaints from some aldermen fed up with the department’s inability to bring down violence in their neighborhoods.

The mayor backed up his hand-picked superintendent during his first news conference since African-American aldermen said last week that their constituents are making louder demands that something be done to quash the epidemic of homicides that has drawn nationwide attention to Chicago….

CHICAGO—The city of Chicago is steadily recovering from an overnight snowstorm that delayed hundreds of murders on Friday morning and will likely continue to push numerous homicides across the city drastically behind schedule, public authorities announced. “As we speak, maintenance crews are working diligently to restore public transportation, de-ice roads, and clear back alleyways so that Chicagoans can quickly resume murdering again,” Department of Streets and Sanitation spokesman Dave Michelson said of the heavy blizzard, which caused numerous homicide cancellations this morning at peak murder times.

“Unfortunately, we’re backed up by about 35 deadly shootings at the moment, but we hope to restore regular death tolls as soon as possible. We apologize to anyone forced to postpone shootings or other killings today and assure concerned murderers that they will be able to resume slayings by the early afternoon.” At press time, authorities reported that murders were up and running in many parts of the city, with four teenagers already gunned down on Chicago’s South Side.

Jhaqueil Reagan had been looking for work for four months before getting into Art Bouvier's car.
An Indianapolis teen was intent on walking 10 miles in freezing conditions for a job interview.
Then a kind stranger offered him a lift — and a job. And as a result, the good Samaritan has seen his business double.

Jhaqueil Reagan set of early Friday morning on his journey to another part of the city for a 1 p.m. job interview at an Indianapolis store. It was roughly a 10-mile trip, and Reagan did not have the money for the bus.

He often had to walk long distances, so it was no big deal.

"If I say I am going to be somewhere, I am going to be there," the 18-year-old Reagan told the Daily News on Tuesday.

Papa Roux is a new New Orleans-style restaurant in Indianapolis/WISH-TV

A few miles into his journey, Reagan stopped in the parking lot of Papa Roux restaurant to ask how far he was from his destination. Co-owner Art Bouvier told him he was still six or seven miles away.

Reagan kept walking, but 15 minutes later, Bouvier spotted him from his car and offered him a lift. He was, after all, going in the same direction.

"I picked him up because he was legitimately walking another seven miles in the slush," Bouvier told The News.

Bouvier drove Reagan to his job interview, but he said he knew immediately he wanted to hire him for himself. It seemed obvious: Anyone willing to walk 10 miles for a job must be worth it.

"My motives were purely selfish, he just looked like a good candidate for employment," said Bouvier, who opened the New Orleans-style restaurant with his wife six years ago after his parents moved to Indianapolis after losing everything to Hurricane Katrina.

Art Bouvier outside of Papa Roux/FOX59

Reagan stayed at a friend's house after the interview so he didn't have to make the long walk home.
"It went OK, it was just another interview," he said. "They didn't look too enthusiastic about anything. I kept an open mind and tried to make a good impression."

He had certainly made an impression on Bouvier. Reagan was offered an entry-level job at Papa Roux that night - with pay approximately 20 percent above the $7.25 per hour minimum wage in Indiana.
Reagan was shocked, to say the least. He started his new job Monday, working as a busboy and server among other duties.

One month short of his 19th birthday, Reagan is unsure what he wants to do with his life but plans to attend college soon. After being unemployed for four months, he is just happy to be making some money.

Jhaqueil Reagan had a job interview 10 miles away, but ended up finding a job in surprising fashion.

"He had a fantastic first day and showed up for a second," Bouvier said.

Bouvier downplays what he did for Reagan, but people have noticed.

A Facebook post telling his story has more than 15,000 "likes" and the media attention has led to a whopping increase in business. He didn't necessarily need any additional help when he hired Reagan, but his staff of 20 is under siege this week. Bouvier believes twice as many people are coming to the restaurant.

"I need a bigger boat, for sure," he said, evoking the famous line from "Jaws."
dboroff@nydailynews.com

[Thanks to reader-researcher RC, who provided the headline, the story, and this observation:

Murder victim Sandi Sutton-Wasmund, 48, and her husband, James. Mrs. Sutton-Wasmund was on her way to the airprort, and left behind three teenaged children.

Murder victim Michael Boldon, 62. Mr. Boldon was driving Mrs. Sutton-Wasmund to the airport in his taxi. When he wasn’t driving, he was caring for his 93-year-old mother, owned two homes, and was looking forward to celebrating his 63rd birthday in two weeks.

Murder victim Ken Cherry, 27, aka Kenny Clutch, was a pimp and a convicted felon. However, his multiple lawyers deny he had ever been in any trouble with the law, and his father insists that it is “racist” to describe Cherry/Clutch as anything but “a good boy.”

Asmayit "May" Hagos, the girlfriend of Kenny Cherry Jr., refutes [sic] allegations in the media that he was a pimp during a press conference at a law office in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Cherry was the man shot while driving his Maserati on the Las Vegas Strip last Thursday. The shooting and subsequent accident killed three people in all. The shooter remains at large.

[N.S.: Since she’s repeatedly been arrested for prostitution and worse, while working for Cherry, it would be impossible for her to “refute” the allegations. All she can do is deny them. And there was no “subsequent accident”; when you murder someone, and that murder causes additional deaths, the additional deaths are murders, not accidental deaths.

Hagos is worse than a whore: She was allegedly in business of enticing men into contracting for her services, and then robbing them—“grand larceny-trick roll”—presumably with Cherry. ]

It arrived early Thursday morning on Las Vegas Boulevard and put the 27-year-old hustler with delusions of grandeur in the national spotlight for half a news cycle.

While police investigated leads and identified a suspect in the shooting, Cherry's father, Kenneth Cherry Sr., held a news conference Saturday and defended his son, calling him a victim and a good kid who only played a tough guy in YouTube videos.

Cherry Jr. called himself "Kenny Clutch," and published reports have referred to him as an "aspiring rapper" who delivered uninspiring ditties via YouTube that celebrated a thug life teeming with pimps, whores, drugs, guns and money.

He knew plenty about all of that. According to court documents, Cherry was a stone pimp who beat his women and spent the money they earned turning tricks in Strip casinos. He was fond of weed and narcotic cough syrup and his reflection in a nightclub mirror.

He died like a bad rap song, and good riddance. The real tragedy is that he took two innocent bystanders with him when his leased Maserati plowed into a Desert Cab on the Boulevard at Flamingo Road. Driver Michael Boldon, 62, and his passenger, Maple Valley, Wash., tourist Sandra Sutton-Wasmund, 48, were engulfed in a ball of fire when the cab's gas tank exploded.

I'm sure there's a rap lyric in there somewhere. No one with a scintilla of conscience would try to find it.

Cherry had a few minor brushes with local law enforcement - speeding tickets in which he gave the officer a California driver's license with an Oakland address - but his lack of convictions in Nevada don't tell the story. Despite having no visible means of income, he drove a Maserati and stayed in a $2,900-a-month condominium at the Metropolis at 360 E. Desert Inn Road.

Maybe knowledge of his job slipped the mind of his attorney Vicki Greco when she told a reporter Cherry was no gang member and, "He was a loyal, dependable friend, and we at the law firm will miss him."

Yeah, he was a real charmer. But I'm not sure whether the mother of one of his children would agree. Before she ran away, Mr. Dependable Friend pimped her out and beat her often.

She was born in 1986 into a home riddled with abuse and drugs. According to court documents, after her drug-addicted mother wound up in prison, at 2 the girl went to live with her grandparents, who devoted themselves to putting her on a positive path.

"I was fortunate to have my grandparents," she would write years later. "I grew up in a beautiful small town and participated in gymnastics, band and all types of sports."

In high school, she excelled in softball and was an A student. After graduating, she earned an associate's degree at a nearby community college and took university classes, but in 2008 she met Cherry through a friend.

After encountering him again at a Strip nightclub, she struck up a relationship she didn't imagine would lead to a life of prostitution in Las Vegas. Maybe it's because the rapping Cherry seemed so generous, so loyal and dependable.

"He promised me the world and I believed every bit of it," she recalled in 2012. "He invited me to move to Las Vegas and 'check it out.' I felt like I had nothing else solid going on and figured it might be fun to live someplace else. I was naive. I had faith and confidence in him and that he wanted a future with me. I did not know at the time that my future would consist of prostituting myself, getting beaten up by Ken on a regular basis, and being arrested and going to jail 27 times.

" I don't know how to explain how it happened in a way that would make sense to anyone. He said it was 'no big deal' and 'easy money.' "

Before long, she was working six nights a week. Her evening quota was $1,500. Come home without it and face the consequences.
"Kenny took every penny I made," she said.

By July 2010, she discovered she was pregnant. She imagined having a baby together might settle him down, but she was kidding herself. He only became more abusive, and kept other women - one of whom was also pregnant - in other Las Vegas apartments.

Their checkered history together includes her application for a restraining order following paternity and domestic violence claims she made in a California court. In a document filed Sept. 7, 2011, in Superior Court, she swore she suffered bruises, cuts and abrasions after being cuffed around repeatedly by Cherry. Photographs showed she was battered. Her Clark County arrest history, with charges reduced to trespassing and a court-ordered AIDS awareness course, begins in May 2009 and is riddled with the telltale signs of a working prostitute.

She wrote that Cherry, "physically assaulted me, pushing me into walls and hitting me. I packed up some belongings and drove back to my family ... Along with the physical abuse, he has consistently been verbally abusive during our relationship."
It shouldn't have been surprising. That's what pimps do to their women. The former couple also sparred legally over custody and visitation issues involving their young daughter.

It's likely Greco would know something about that. She not only represented Cherry, but according to court records she also was the woman's criminal lawyer. Maybe it slipped the attorney's mind while she was grieving over the loss of Mr. Dependable Friend.

Kenny Clutch caught his bullet Thursday morning on the Boulevard, but save your tears for cabdriver Boldon and passenger Sutton-Wasmund, whose devastated family members will deal with their loss the rest of their lives.

Then say a prayer for all the women of the night who, for reasons most of us can't fully comprehend, find themselves under the pimp's spell.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/Smith.

Kenneth Cherry Sr. cries as he talks during a news conference in Las Vegas Saturday about the death of his son Kenny Cherry. Kenny Cherry was shot and killed early Thursday morning while driving his Maserati on the Las Vegas Strip. »

Posted: Feb. 25, 2013 | 5:54 p.m.
Updated: Feb. 26, 2013 | 12:33 p.m.

Kenneth Cherry Sr. set aside his grief long enough to hold a Saturday news conference after the shooting death of his son, Kenny Cherry Jr., two days earlier on Las Vegas Boulevard.

After suffering a gunshot wound to the chest early Thursday, a dying Cherry Jr. drove his leased Maserati into a Desert Cab, killing driver Michael Boldon and passenger Sandra Sutton-Wasmund of Seattle.

Cherry Sr. called his son an aspiring rapper with the moniker "Kenny Clutch" a good kid who was a victim of senseless violence.

But dad didn't tell the reporters present what the 27-year-old did to pay the condo rent and the lease on that Maserati. If we presume for the sake of discussion Kenneth Sr. didn't know his son was a pimp, the father needn't have looked far for confirmation.

He could have asked one of his son's girlfriends, Asmayit "May" Hagos. She lived with Cherry Jr., and her arrest record indicates she worked for him.

Hagos wasn't exactly in hiding. She also attended that news conference.

She was cited by a Metro traffic officer while driving a vehicle registered to Cherry Jr., but it's when Hagos isn't driving that she gets in the most trouble.

In 2011, she was arrested on charges of soliciting prostitution, criminal conspiracy and grand larceny-trick roll. In keeping with the local justice system's long history of taking it easy on prostitutes and positively coddling pimps, the charges against her were negotiated and reduced.

A check of the arrest record of a former girlfriend of Cherry shows the same pattern of prostitution behavior: arrest, negotiation, fine and back to work.
Hagos hasn't been off local law enforcement's radar. Far from it.

On Feb. 20, District Judge Jennifer Togliatti signed a bench warrant for her arrest for violating the terms of her probation in the 2011 case. That bench warrant was signed just a day before Hagos' boyfriend died on the street.

Surely Hagos will want to fill in the grieving father on the sordid details. Maybe she can also tell him whether Kenny Clutch had had a falling out with his former late-night running mate, Ammar "Ash" Harris. Authorities on Friday issued an arrest warrant for Harris in connection with the shooting. They are seeking the public's help in locating the suspect, who police say shot Cherry in the chest.

Harris was last seen driving a black Range Rover, which police later recovered. He wasn't alone in the Range Rover, sources confirm.

Because Cherry's father is surely interested in justice being done, perhaps he will implore family lawyer Bob Beckett to help make available witnesses that might assist the police in their homicide investigation. My attempt to reach Beckett, the former Nye County district a ttorney, was unsuccessful.

While the grieving father made much of his deceased son's gentle nature, the facts say otherwise. Dad's protestations aside, in 2007 Cherry Jr. was convicted of a gun charge in California. According to court documents, he severely beat a former girlfriend who also was the mother of one of his children.

After she tired of being used as a prostitute and watching every dollar she earned go into his pocket, the fights and beatings escalated.

On Sept. 1, 2011, at the apartment they shared, she would write in an affidavit, "He chased me down the hall. I tried to lock myself in the bathroom. He broke the door and started hitting me, over and over again. I tried to protect myself in the corner of the shower. He hit me so many times I was seeing stars. I finally managed to run out into the hallway and he came after me, hitting me until I collapsed on the floor where he proceeded to kick me twice, once in my head and once in my thigh. He then threw me out into the main hallway and locked me out of the apartment until he left."

Sounds like the good kid was having a bad day, but that's the way it is with pimps.

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/Smith.

Murder victim Sandi Sutton-Wasmund, 48, and her husband, James. Mrs. Sutton-Wasmund was on her way to the airprort, and left behind three teenaged children.

Murder victim Michael Boldon, 62. Mr. Boldon was driving Mrs. Sutton-Wasmund to the airport in his taxi. When he wasn’t driving, he was caring for his 93-year-old mother, owned two homes, and was looking forward to celebrating his 63rd birthday in two weeks.

Murder victim Ken Cherry, 27, aka Kenny Clutch, was a pimp and a convicted felon. However, his multiple lawyers deny he had ever been in any trouble with the law, and his father insists that it is “racist” to describe Cherry/Clutch as anything but “a good boy.”

Smith wrote that Cherry's father, Kenneth Sr., "called his son an aspiring rapper with the moniker 'Kenny Clutch' a good kid who was a victim of senseless violence."

And:

"But dad didn't tell the reporters present what the 27-year old did to pay the condo rent and the lease on that Maserati. If we presume for the sake of discussion Kenneth Sr. didn't know his son was a pimp, the father needn't have looked far for confirmation."

"He could have asked one of his son's girlfriends, Asmayit 'May' Hagos. She lived with Cherry Jr., and her arrest record indicates she worked for him."

"Hagos wasn't exactly in hiding. She also attended that news conference."

The column has still more relevant information. Smith concludes with: "Sounds like the good kid was having a bad day, but that's the way it is with pimps."

“Community Journalism student Lucie Shelly (right) mentors high school journalist Anna Aguilar of the Southern Scoop of Southern High School in Durham.”/Jock Lauterer [Let us hope and pray that Lucie Shelly doesn’t become the next Eve Carson.]

Apparently, the murder of promising white coeds in the Chapel Hill area was proceeding too slowly. Never fear! Some professors at the school of the late Eve Carson have hit upon an idea to speed things up: Sucking white girls into a program serving the community that produced Carson’s racist killers.

AmRen reader Ulick observed,

Two thugs murder an innocent white girl and some white Liberal professor rewards the community that spawned the murderers with a $25,000 grant. Meanwhile, there is a poor white community that could really use $25,000 that has never spawned murderers. White Liberal “elites” and professors look at working class whites with contempt while simultaneously looking at poor minorities as their pet projects to show how progressive they are.

At the The News & Observer, death cultist recordguy_2000 responded to a banned poster,

Why usually the negative from you? If you knew anything about Jock Lauterer (and I only know him from reputation, not personally), you'd be ashamed to question the effectiveness of his efforts.

Maybe the worst of the worst aren't being touched by The Voice. But instead of doubting the positives, the concept, the involvement of inner city youths, the students that it is touching, the positive effect it's having on white/black relationships, the building of trust between the two races, why don't you be a bit proactive. Volunteer. Try to reach the worst of the worst yourself. Get involved.

I responded to recordguy_2000 ,

This is a sick joke, right? Because Jock Lauterer supposedly has good intentions, we’re not permitted to use our reason, and are supposed to act like brain-dead lemmings. And if we don’t, you’ll call us bad names. Boo-hoo.

Why would any sane person “Volunteer… to reach the worst of the worst”? You are trying to talk decent people into undertaking suicide missions. Something tells me that you’re not suicidal.

Anyone who would give you the time of day is either very stupid or very young and callow. The young and callow need to be protected, not led to their deaths.

Rational, decent readers are advised to google, “Doomed by Diversity.”

Jock Lauterer was stunned and angry five years ago when Eve Carson, the student body president at UNC-Chapel Hill, was abducted from her house near campus early March 5 and murdered.

Two young men from Durham, DeMario Atwater and Laurence Lovette, were arrested and eventually pleaded guilty or were convicted.

Lauterer, who teaches community journalism and photography at UNC, grew up in Chapel Hill and considers himself a townie.

He mourned the death of an exceptional young woman who was making a difference and was destined to do much more. He also was angry that violent crime from Durham had trespassed into his Chapel Hill.

He didn’t know what to do about his sadness and anger.

Carson was gone. Lovette and Atwater were in jail and likely headed to prison for the rest of their lives. All he could was shake his fist at the world. Nothing good could emerge from this, he thought.

Still, there lingered in Lauterer a feeling that he – Jock Lauterer, then 62 years old, college teacher, journalist and Chapel Hill resident – should do something, he told me this week.

That same spring, Lauterer had met Mai Nguyen, assistant professor in the UNC Department of City and Regional Planning. They were part of UNC’s first class of Faculty Engaged Scholars.

Nguyen saw that Lauterer, in developing his own response to Carson’s death, was paralyzed.

Nguyen and her students were studying and mapping Northeast Central Durham, the area where one of Carson’s killers lived. Lauterer accompanied them on a tour of the troubled area, two square miles known for violent crime.

The next day, Lauterer received an email from Nguyen. One of her Ph.D. students, Hye-Sung Han, had suggested that Northeast Central Durham needed the cohesion that comes from a community newspaper. The email exploded at Lauterer as if its letters were a foot tall.

He thought: That’s it!

Lauterer had been a small-town newspaper editor. He knew how to do community journalism. He could do community journalism in Durham or anyplace else.
And if he could put cameras, pens and notebooks in the hands of urban teenagers, maybe those kids would feel they were a part of something good, that they had a stake in their community.

But where to start? With a commercial newspaper, you start at the bank, he wrote later. With a volunteer newspaper, you need a different kind of capital.

Lauterer established a partnership with two journalism professors at N.C. Central University in Durham – Bruce dePyssler and Lisa Paulin. The three of them would become the publishers of the new newspaper. The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation provided a grant of $25,000.

The university teachers arranged for some UNC journalism students, most of them white, to meet with NCCU journalism students, all of them black. In their first meetings, they didn’t mix much. [Of course, not. The liberal white kids wanted to mix, but the racist black kids just wanted them to surrender the program money to them, and beat it. NCCU is the segregated black school whose students and profs not only aggressively supported the Duke Rape Hoax, which was engineered by NCCU student/prostitute Crystal Gail Mangum, but loved the idea of railroading three innocent white men.]

But then they split into two large vans (with Carolina students and Central students in each van), toured Northeast Central Durham and ended with a picnic lunch. The students bonded. [Yeah. The UNC studetns bonded with each other, and the NCCU students bonded with each other.] That was a key moment: The college students were united in their effort to create a newspaper. [If they were really united, the black students would have covered half of the expenses, instead of living off of white charity.]

But they also wanted to involve teenagers from the neighborhood. To do so, they sought the support of local Durham leaders. That support was hard to win. They called a meeting of local pastors. Only one showed up. And he was the host.

“Maybe we were just too white and too Chapel Hill,” Lauterer thought.

[Lauterer’s response to the black preachers’ racism is to act as if the racists were right!]

Widening involvement

A local high school journalism teacher suggested they involve kids from across Durham, not just from the targeted neighborhood. Good idea.

A session at the Boys and Girls Club on Alston Avenue in central Durham was a turning point. UNC student Carly Brantmeyer, in giving a photo lesson, engaged the teens in a way Lauterer didn’t think possible. Composition. Light. Vantage.

One of Lauterer’s own students had shown him how to reach the teens. When they got their hands on the cameras, they were transformed. Some of those teens became the core of the newspaper staff. Eventually, students from four Durham schools would work at the paper.

It was time to launch. But what would this paper be called? Residents of Northeast Central Durham kept saying their voices were not being heard. [For at least 50 years, whites have been bending over for young blacks, and listening to and acceding to their every demand, while the young blacks robotically repeat that no one is listening to them. The blacks need to shut up and listen, for a change.] The paper would be called the VOICE.

It was published first online in September 2009 at durhamvoice.org. It made barely a ripple. That changed when it began publishing in print in February 2010. Now it is published in print once a month during the school year with 2,000 copies distributed at 60 places.

Community, high schools

The VOICE writes about the people of Northeast Central Durham. It publishes stories about high schools, churches, restaurants, homeless people, volunteers, crime, grocery stores, urban farming, musicians, yard sales, celebrations and just about anything else in its neighborhoods.

The VOICE tells this community that it’s important enough to have its own newspaper. The VOICE is supported by grants and uses no university money. Various groups, including the city of Durham, and businesses have helped. The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at UNC, funded the first year of printing. Scientific Properties donates office space for a newsroom.

[No one ever stopped “the community” from having its own newspaper.]

VOICE college staffers mentor local high school journalism students and have helped revive the student newspapers at three Durham high schools.

Sharif Ruebin, 17, is a junior at J.D. Clement Early College High School in Durham. He hadn’t thought much about journalism but started working for the VOICE as a sophomore. “They really let me be a part of the program,” he told me Friday. Now he’s the editor of his school paper and wants to be a professional journalist.

Eve Carson spoke of the Carolina Way – not the since-discredited Carolina Way of the sports boosters but a Carolina Way more central to the mission and spirit of the university. She once defined the Carolina Way as “inclusion, involvement, diversity, acceptance, seeking to be great but always remembering that we must be good.”

The VOICE is Eve Carson’s Carolina Way. It is Jock Lauterer’s Carolina Way. It is the true Carolina Way.

As the fifth anniversary of Carson’s death approaches, may the VOICE and its student journalists speak loud, long and clear.

I really started thinking about immigration in my first year in college in England, as a result of Enoch Powell's 1968 (aargh!) speech on immigration into the UK, in my opinion one of the greatest in the language.

Subsequently, I observed the contradictions of US policy as a student at Stanford and an immigrant myself, first to Canada and then to the U.S. This is discussed in my 1992 National Review cover story Time To Rethink Immigration, sometimes credited with restarting the modern debate, which grew into my 1995 book Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster.

Principal Iris Blige conspired to defame teachers she didn’t like, in order to destroy their careers at her school, Fordham High School of the Arts . Blige is a notorious graduate of Mayor Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy for future school principals. This pic is not from the New York Times story below.

This picture, of inexperienced, hopelessly young school principal Allison Gaines Pell, then 34, another Leadership Academy/OPU product, is from the New York Times story

They are younger than their predecessors, have less experience in the classroom and are, most often, responsible for far fewer students. But their salaries are higher and they have greater freedom over hiring and budgets, handling a host of responsibilities formerly shouldered by their supervisors.

Among the most striking transformations of New York’s public school system since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took charge in 2002 is that of the role of principal, once the province of middle-aged teachers promoted through the ranks, now often filled by young graduates of top colleges.

“I wanted to change the old system,” Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said in an interview. “New leadership is a powerful way to do that.”

One of Mr. Klein’s proudest achievements is luring promising candidates to the toughest schools by providing more autonomy in exchange for accountability through test scores and other data.

But an analysis by The New York Times of the city’s signature report-card system shows that schools run by graduates of the celebrated New York City Leadership Academy — which the mayor created and helped raise more than $80 million for — have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes.

A separate Times analysis shows that since 2002, opening hundreds of new schools and raising salaries have swelled the principals’ payroll 43 percent after adjusting for inflation. The average salary among the current 1,500 school leaders tops $133,000, 10 percent higher than their 1,200 counterparts in 2002 in inflation-adjusted dollars, even as the median household income nationally has risen only marginally.

An average of 649 students are under each principal’s purview, compared with 879 six years ago; pay per pupil, then, has jumped to $205 from $138 in 2008 dollars.

Nearly 80 percent of the city’s principals were not on the job in 2001; Chad A. Altman, the 28-year-old head of a Bronx elementary school, was still studying public policy at Carnegie Mellon University when the mayor was petitioning Albany for school control.
Indeed, 22 percent of today’s principals are under 40, compared with 6 percent in 2002; about 20 percent of them have less than five years of teaching experience, double the percentage in 2002.

Mr. Klein’s cultivation of a new breed of school leadership is being watched around the country, where many cities are grappling with waves of principal retirements even as more is being asked of public schools.

As New York State lawmakers consider whether to renew the 2002 mayoral control law, which expires June 30, one proposal on the table would revive the district superintendents, now largely powerless, to more closely supervise and support principals.

For all of New York’s recent focus and investment in school leadership, more than a quarter of teachers said in city surveys last spring that they did not trust their principals or consider them effective managers, and more than a third of those leaving the system cited the quality of school leadership as among the main reasons. “Perceptions of principal leadership skills are drivers of attrition,” an internal report concluded.

Teacher turnover has been higher at schools run by Leadership Academy principals — over the summer of 2007, nearly a quarter of these principals lost at least a third of their teachers, compared with 9 percent of other principals — though some see that as evidence the new leaders are shaking things up. Iris Blige, a graduate of the first class of the Leadership Academy, has seen at least eight assistant principals and dozens of teachers leave the Fordham High School of the Arts since she took over in 2004; she was the subject of an angry protest in March.

In interviews with three dozen principals, former principals and education experts, many said the newfound ability to select faculty was invaluable, but painted a portrait of a job that has grown complex and unwieldy.

“You’re a teacher, you’re Judge Judy, you’re a mother, you’re a father, you’re a pastor, you’re a therapist, you’re a nurse, you’re a social worker,” said Maxine Nodel, principal since 2003 of the 481-student Millennium Art Academy in the Bronx. “You’re a curriculum planner, you’re a data gatherer, you’re a budget scheduler, you’re a vision spreader.”

Ms. Nodel, who has taught math, English, science, art and chess over 18 years, earned two A’s in a row under the city’s new school report card system. But, she said, “This is the most exhausted I’ve ever been.”

Brilliance and Mediocrity

Allison Gaines Pell could be the personification of the new principalship. A graduate of Brown University with a master’s degree in education from Harvard, she taught for three years at St. Ann’s, a Brooklyn private school, and two in Syracuse, and worked for educational nonprofit agencies before being fast-tracked to the principal’s office through the Leadership Academy in 2005.

At 34, she is one of 132 current school leaders under age 35, up from 26 in 2002, and one of 237 who have worked in the district less than a decade, up from 54 in 2002. She earns $127,000 a year running a middle school of 278.

Over a few days at her Urban Assembly Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, this spring, Ms. Gaines Pell gave out high school acceptance letters, videotaped two lessons, revised the laptop security policy, joined a meeting between the school nurse and a student with a hurt hip, and experienced the joys and headaches of being in charge of her own budget.

Headache: a rumor that when students did not pay for lunch, she would have to make up the shortfall (she has yet to determine whether this is true). Joy: a new computer program — which she could buy without approval from on high — designed to help teachers collaborate online.

But while Ms. Gaines Pell’s school earned an A from the city this fall, The Times’s analysis shows that Leadership Academy graduates were less than half as likely to get A’s as other principals, and almost twice as likely to earn C’s or worse. Among elementary and middle-school principals on the job less than three years, Academy graduates were about a third as likely to get A’s as those who did not attend the program.

While Academy graduates do tend to be placed in some of the city’s lowest-achieving schools, the report-card system has built-in controls to account for that, emphasizing progress over performance and comparing schools with similar demographics. Still, Sandra J. Stein, chief executive of the Leadership Academy, said the cards — the city’s primary accountability measure — are not a fair gauge of her graduates because, as she put it, “it takes time to reverse a downward trend.”

After five years running primarily on private donations, the Leadership Academy won a city contract last June for up to $10 million a year. Its centerpiece is the Aspiring Principals Program, a 14-month paid boot camp that has graduated 336 people since 2003, 227 of whom are now principals — 15 percent of the total.

One Leadership Academy alumnus was removed from his post this month, pending Education Department investigations, after a public screaming match with the school’s parent coordinator; more than 250 parents had signed a letter citing a “litany of problems” including “increased staff turnover, parent dissatisfaction and general turmoil.” Another was removed upon his arrest in February for driving while intoxicated and fleeing the scene of an accident.

The first independent analysis of the academy’s effectiveness, done at New York University, is due in June. “I think our batting average is quite good,” Mr. Klein said. “Could it improve? I’m sure it could improve.”

Pulling Their Own Strings

Andrew M. L. Turay vividly remembers, back when he was principal of the Bronx’s mammoth Evander Childs High School in 2001, the day an assistant principal who had struggled at another school walked into his office and announced she would now be working with him: superintendent’s orders. “You were the figurehead as a principal, but the actual power was in the superintendent’s office,” he said. “They were pulling the strings.”

Now, as principal of Peace and Diversity Academy, a small high school in the Bronx that he founded in 2004, Mr. Turay not only picks his own staff but decides how to train them. Still cringing over the time he returned to Evander from a required daylong monthly session to find that a student had assaulted a staff member in the cafeteria, Mr. Turay can — and does — choose to skip virtually all meetings outside the office.

Where he oversaw more than 3,000 students at Evander, Mr. Turay now has 315, and makes it his business to know who was just absent for five days (the girl with multiple face piercings), and who is struggling with sexual identity (18 students are openly gay). There is no superintendent regularly visiting; it is up to Mr. Turay to call his network leader — his primary support person — on her cellphone when he needs help. Someone sent by the Education Department descends on the school for a few days at least once every three years and then submits a “quality review” on its shortcomings and successes, but Mr. Turay is judged, in large part, by a thick stack of documents.

Compliance checklists, on items including vision-testing and fire drills. School report cards (he got a B). Parent and teacher surveys. A review of how well he has met his own goals.

Mr. Turay, who is 57 and has worked in city schools for 24 years, prefers the new system, or at least the small-school environment. “I didn’t know kids, I didn’t know parents,” he said of his days at Evander Childs. “I couldn’t tell if I helped anyone, really.”

But the independence that has helped Mr. Turay flourish has tripped up others.

Maria Penaherrera — who started as a substitute teacher 20 years ago and worked her way up to the principal’s office — used her financial freedom to hire four assistant principals at the 900-student Public School 114 in Canarsie, and ran up $150,000 in debt. Then she eliminated three of the positions only to have the fourth assistant principal quit. That left a custodian to take charge in February when a carbon monoxide alarm went off while Ms. Penaherrera was out. She has since been reassigned to a central office post while the Education Department investigates, and did not respond to requests for comment.

Peter McNally, executive vice president of the principals’ union — which has generally supported the mayor’s reforms — said the biggest complaint from members was “that they spend more time looking at the data than in classrooms observing and supporting instruction.” Indeed, many had deep reservations about a system in which, as one principal put it, “my report card is my boss.”

“If teaching and learning become about credits and grades, it’s not about learning,” said Jill Herman, who retired last year after three decades as a teacher, principal and network leader.

Rookies Do Worse

Philip Weinberg walks the halls of Brooklyn’s 1,250-student High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology like the beloved mayor of a close-knit town, popping into a young math teacher’s classroom, ushering teenagers off the sidewalk after dismissal in a manner both firm and warm. “He’s cool with all the students,” said Anthony Mesa, a senior who took the liberty of adjusting Mr. Weinberg’s scarf.

Mr. Weinberg, 49, started teaching English at the school, in Bay Ridge, in 1986 and became its principal in 2001; several of his staff members are former students. He is one of 255 principals — 17 percent of the total — in the same post as before mayoral control. (The number of rookie principals soared to 20 percent in 2003 and 25 percent in 2004, but has settled down to 12 percent over the past two years.)

The Times’s analysis shows that experience counts — at least on school report cards. Forty-three percent of principals with at least a decade at their schools received A’s last fall (including Mr. Weinberg), compared with 30 percent of those who had been at their schools up to two years.

“The longer you know a story, the better you know the story,” Mr. Weinberg said. “I would hate to have been judged on my first three years as principal.”

In an interview, Mr. Klein said he would like to see good principals stay 8 to 10 years; 5 out of 6, though, have not been around that long. And the first two principals the chancellor cited as models were Shimon Waronker, 40, a Leadership Academy graduate who is on leave from the school system to attend a graduate program at Harvard, and Marc S. Sternberg, 36, a Princeton and Harvard Business School graduate who plans to leave the high school he founded in 2004, Bronx Lab, this summer.

Elana Karopkin left Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice last summer, at 32, for a charter school group, saying she was physically and emotionally “exhausted” from what she described as a “Herculean task.”

And Michelle Harring, 62, retired last year after nearly a decade as principal of the Earth School on the Lower East Side, complaining of too much time spent “belaboring the testing statistics” or on the computer as well as bureaucratic reshufflings that left her scrambling to figure out whom to call for what.

“The job had many more pressures coming from lots of different directions, that I often felt took away from my time as a person who supported both teachers and the children in the classroom,” she explained. “I think of C.E.O.’s as people for whom the bottom lines are numbers and profit lines. I don’t think principals should be C.E.O.’s.”

Amy Ellen Schwartz, director of the Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University, who is heading the Leadership Academy study, wonders whether the school system has constructed “a job description for which there are very few really good candidates.”

“It may be that it’s an impossible job,” she said. “You’re asking for things that don’t often come in the same person.”

Readers at KPRC/click2houston were suspicious about this one. The mother has an Eastern European accent, and the two surviving suspects are both white—in Harris County? The readers think this home invasion was anything but random, and I agree. But no further information has been forthcoming.

WITH LAST WEEK'S news that Toyota had surpassed General Motors as the world's most prolific carmaker, and the coming 40th anniversaries of many of the urban riots of the 1960s, I decided to reread Thomas Sugrue?s The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.

First published in 1996 by Princeton University Press, and reissued two years ago, the widely acclaimed book is about the erstwhile Motor City but has broader applications; as Sugrue wrote in the original version, "Detroit's journey from urban heyday to urban crisis has been mirrored in other cities across the nation."

Equally relevant is his take on what has happened to cities of the Rust Belt and the Northeast ? a group that includes Baltimore as well as Detroit ? in the decade since his book was published.

"For folks like you and me, for folks of upper-middle-class backgrounds, cities have become much more appealing than they were," Sugrue said by telephone from Philadelphia, where he is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

"There are more choices in restaurants, entertainment and housing. But for the workingclass people and poor people, the improvement in urban life has been nonexistent or incremental." [When Sugrue says "workingclass people and poor people," he's talking about blacks.]

Detroit's urban riots occurred in July 1967, after police raided an after-hours bar; Baltimore's in April of 1968, after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

In his book, Sugrue, a native of Detroit, concluded that the genesis of the problems of abandonment and poverty so apparent in Detroit and many other cities began much earlier than most scholars realized.

"The coincidence and mutual reinforcement of race, economics and politics ? from the 1940s to the 1960s set the stage for the fiscal, social and economic crisis that confront urban America today,?" he wrote.

For example, he observed that the "rusting of the Rust Belt" began not with foreign competition of the 1970s but with the largely unnoticed movement of manufacturing jobs in the 1950s to rural areas of the Midwest and South.

The de-industrialization was occurring at the same time millions of blacks were leaving the rural South for the cities, where they faced discrimination in jobs and employment.

"The most visible and intractable manifestation of racial inequality in the postwar city was residential segregation," Sugrue wrote.

Many of the events and circumstances Sugrue described in Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s had equivalents in Baltimore. The placement of public housing in poor, segregated communities and the resistance of the suburbs to public housing, for one. White opposition to neighborhood integration, for another. The practice of blockbusting, for a third.

His description of the process of neighborhood change is also pertinent: "During economic slumps, houses in predominantly black neighborhoods changed hands with alarming frequency. As a result, housing values fell, and all but the most exclusive black neighborhoods were unstable. The instability of newly black neighborhoods and the rapid deterioration of older housing stock drove many middle-class black homeowners out in search of better housing opportunities on the city?s ever-changing racial frontier."

The population of Detroit and Baltimore peaked in 1950 ? the former at 1.85 million people, the latter at just under 950,000.

But with the well-documented woes of the auto industry, Detroit's problems have been much greater. The city has lost more than half its population, compared with about a third for Baltimore. And while Baltimore?s population loss shows signs of leveling off,
Detroit's continues unabated. Detroit has lost 65,000 people this decade, according to census estimates.

Sugrue said Detroit's casinos have helped generate revenue for the city but have not had much economic spillover. He said the city has had trouble creating jobs and attracting immigrants and others to live there.

"The most significant change over the last 10 years has been the increased popularity of urban living among the well-to-do and empty-nesters," he said. "That's been true in Detroit, too, but not in the same degree as Chicago, Philadelphia or NewYork.

"But if you go even to Chicago, there are large sections that still look a lot like Detroit. By and large, the forces that have gentrified downtowns have not made their ways to minority neighborhoods. Poverty, disinvestment and isolation more or less continue."
Sowhat?s a city to do?

Sugrue called expanding affordable housing "crucial." Also, he said cities must continue to support core employers, which in many cases are medical and educational institutions ? something Baltimore is doing most notably with the East Baltimore biotech park.

"They're critical not just in terms of the built environment but in terms of providing a wide range of diverse jobs," Sugrue said.

About Me

I am a dissident journalist, whose work has been published in dozens of daily newspapers, magazines, and journals in English, German, and Swedish, under my own name and many pseudonyms. While living in internal exile in New York, where I am whitelisted, I maintain NSU/The Wyatt Earp Journalism Bureau and some eight other blogs (some are distinctive but occasional venues, while others are mirrors), and also write for stout-hearted men such as Peter Brimelow and Jared Taylor. Please hit the “Donate” button on your way out. Thanks, in advance.
Follow my tweets at @NicholasStix.

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